Don’t Dis the Em Dash

Seriously, people, the em dash [—] wasn’t born yesterday, and it’s not exclusive to AI, so it’s baffling that some have decided to drop it altogether in their writing, for fear that AI-detecting software will target their text as AI-generated.

As noted in my AI Gets a C as Editor blog, AI-detection software is very unreliable—period (see what I did there?). Classic works written long before AI existed have been run through AI-detection software and falsely flagged as AI-generated, sometimes at surprisingly high percentages.

Far from being an AI tell, the em dash has been around since the 17th century. I have long been fond of using this humble pause-maker, and no one can stop me. It can be found liberally throughout Emily Dickinson’s poetry and William Faulkner’s novels, just to name a few pre-AI examples.

Are there ways for humans to spot AI-generated prose? Maybe, to a certain extent. There can be a certain flatness to the writing, fabricated references or stats, and a handful of other suspected tells.

And even though AI often seems to favor the em dash, many human authors do too. That's why it's unfair to treat the em dash as meaningful evidence that a piece of writing originated with AI.

June 2026